Weddings are as synonymous with Las Vegas as gambling, neon, and slightly woozy memories. Whether it’s The Hangover or Casino, Britney Spears’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it first marriage, or even Elvis’s own wedding to Priscilla, the desert city stands in as the unofficial wedding capital of America. Admittedly, Vegas is not the powerhouse destination it once was: Last year just over 73,000 weddings took place, a decline of more than 40 percent since its heyday in 2004, when 128,000 licenses were issued in Clark County (home to LV).

The drop reflects an overall softening of marriage rates in the developed world, of course, but it’s still a staggering volume—and one the city is keen to see increase again. Visit Las Vegas has rolled out an aggressive marketing campaign (remember this ad?) and a standalone Wedding Chamber of Commerce even launched three years ago. It now has around 100 active members, including caterers, officiants, and, of course, many of the almost 100 wedding chapels dotting the city. Budget venues like the Little Neon Chapel (which proudly claims that weddings there start at just $39) still dominate downtown—and were the only option until a 1970s law halted the construction of new freestanding chapels. The wedding-planning focus has since shifted to the Strip, where hotels have claimed a larger stake in the lucrative business.

Today, almost every major resort features its own wedding venue, though arguably one of the Strip’s toniest sits inside MGM’s

Aria. Since it opened in April 2013, this plush chapel—think yards of velvet and dramatic chandeliers—has hosted 1,500 couples, whose marriages were overseen by chapel director Colleen Kestel-Raidmae and her team of five. She started working on the Strip as a cocktail server, only later stumbling into a job that’s now become a passion. “I’d never really bothered to look at Vegas wedding chapels. I assumed it was all plastic flowers and Elvis, which didn’t interest me at all,” she says. “But we are quite the opposite of that—we’re more of a luxury destination.”

The most popular package, dubbed Desire, costs $4,500, including a room for the night, an officiant, flowers for the bride and groom, champagne toasts, and access to the chapel for an hour (max capacity: 60 guests). Couples willing to splurge even more can pay up to $25,000 for a grander showcase, with room for up to 200 guests out by the pool and a DJ-driven reception. Thankfully, in a move that would please Las Vegas unofficial patron saint Liberace, every package includes a pianist with an extensive song list. (If you’re a couple celebrating à deux, you can instead opt for an in-suite wedding, which starts at $3,200.)

Kestel-Raidmae and her team work on around 400 weddings per year, with fall and spring their busiest periods—the extra-long Labor Day weekend is a standout. Surprisingly, Saturday isn’t the prime day; rather, Vegas-hitched couples often opt for Thursday, as a kick-off to a long weekend of celebrations with their friends. On days like those, Colleen will be running weddings in two-hour slots from 2–8 p.m., while also juggling those in-suite ceremonies.

An Elvis impersonator at The Little White Chapel.

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Most of Aria’s clients are visitors rather than Vegas residents, and around 20 percent are from overseas, notably the U.K., Canada, and Brazil. To help juggle time zones, the chapel has its own planning portal, where Kestel-Raidmae and her team can upload options—think picking flowers or an assortment of songs—allowing couples to browse them the next time they’re awake. (Forget elopements: Though Vegas was historically seen as a place to pull the trigger for a shotgun wedding, Colleen’s couples plan, on average, a year ahead.) The venue is fully webcast-enabled, too, so far-flung family members don’t have to miss the ceremony.

“We had one couple from the U.K. who met at the nightclub here, and had a daughter they named Aria,” Kestel-Raidmae recalls. “So they wanted to come back with her to solidify their wedding at our chapel.” Another bride, whose heritage was part-Chinese, requested as dragon dance after the ceremony, only to be told that regulations didn’t allow it; the denial was a ruse, though, cooked up by Kestel-Raidmae and her team with the bride’s brother, who wanted to surprise her. (Aria’s on-call minister speaks four languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—though a Mandarin speaker is also available.)

Around five percent of couples, she says, are now same-sex, and her team has even been trained by Bernadette Coveney Smith of LGBTQ+ wedding and events specialist 14 Stories to help them navigate some aspects particular to LGBTQ+ bashes. “It can sometimes be a little uncomfortable if it’s the first time families have met, so she suggests a pre-pour of champagne to loosen everyone up,” says Kestel-Raidmae. One of her most touching ceremonies united two women in their 70s, who had been together for more than four decades and finally were able to marry; they picked their favorite hotel as the venue.

Many couples who have close personal connections to the hotel—often involving Vegas’s other industry, gambling—have chosen to celebrate their nuptials there. Take the high-rolling regular, a member of the invitation-only Noir level of MGM’s MLife loyalty program, who tasked Kestel-Raidmae with throwing the most extravagant wedding Aria has ever seen. “It started off being as very small, simple ceremony for his son and future daughter-in-law,” Kestel-Raidmae says. “Then the bride came in, and kept picking this and that, and within four days it had become a nearly $200,000 ceremony. The wine was flown in from China, and so were the guests.” At least the expense earned the father of the groom ample MLife points—a bonus only applicable to a Vegas wedding like this. “If couples aren’t members, we’ll offer to make them ones. I mean they spend so much money with us, they might as well put it towards that.”

If lavish bashes on the Strip aren’t the Vegas wedding of your dreams (or accommodated by your wallet), you can still wreath your day in kitsch. Last year, Cirque du Soleil launched a Zumanity wedding package, where the raunchy show’s emcee, drag queen Edie, unites couples outside the show’s theater at the New York-New York resort and casino; scantily clad acrobats fill out the bridal party. And, of course, there’s the campy, Pink Cadillac– and Elvis-accented Little White Wedding Chapel, first established in 1951. It will cost just 50 bucks to pledge your troth at its drive-thru window—minister’s fees not included.